Join co-hosts Anne Moore and Chris Stacey for an innovative, exciting, and passionate approach to world literature. Our current country is Ireland during "The Troubles." For our third meeting we discuss the novel Trespasses By Louise Kennedy.

Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast, teaching at a parochial school and moonlighting at her family’s pub. There she meets Michael Agnew, a Protestant barrister who’s made a name for himself defending IRA members. Against her better judgment, Cushla lets herself get drawn in by him and his sophisticated world, and an affair ignites. Then the father of a student is savagely beaten, setting in motion a chain reaction that will threaten everything, and everyone, Cushla most wants to protect.

Club Member Registration: The book club is exclusively for club members. Here is a list of club members: CUCC Club Members.

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Non-Club Members Wait List: All registrants who are not club members are placed on a wait list. You are contacted if any seats are available after club member registration.

Date: Thursday, October 8, 2026

Social Hour: 5:00pm

Book Club: 6:00PM Central

Location: Private room. Club on Michigan Avenue.

Reviews

“Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking. . .  A rising sense of tension throughout comes to a shocking head. I am not a crier, but by the final pages of Trespasses, I was in tears. It’s a testament to Kennedy’s talents that we come to love and care so much about her characters. And that reading about a long and difficult period from the recent past feels not like history, but like a warning.” —J.Courtney Sullivan, New York Times Book Review

“Distinguished by a quality rare in fiction at any time: a sense of utter conviction. It is a story told with such compulsive attention to the textures of its world that every page feels like a moral and intellectual event.” —The Guardian

Photo Credit: Penguin Random House, Promotional Materials, Public Domain